Businesses recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, virtual machines, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth. Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, for example by migrating data to lower-cost storage over time, reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc.
As cloud data storage increases in popularity it also gives rise to obstacles in the smooth management and protection of data. For example, cloud storage providers charge fees usually based on the amount of data stored, which can make cloud data storage expensive for certain uncontrolled uses, such as storing “live” production data to the cloud. On occasion, cloud storage may not be available due to network failures, again being a problem for “live” production data. Also, cloud data storage is generally not user-accessible with the ease and convenience provided by network shares configured in network attached storage (NAS) as supported by the well-known CIFS and NFS interface standards, among others.